A new essay, “Design’s Just Dessert,” has been posted at Voice: the AIGA Journal of Design. The essay is the second “bonus track” (the first was “I Believe in Design” at Design Observer) from the “Volume” sessions—written along with the new essays for the book but not to be included. Big thanks to ODU design student Rebecca Soorani for starring in the article’s pix, and to Jiwon Lee for art directing.
Repurposes
Baron and Ellin Gordon Galleries at Old Dominion University
March 20–April 18, 2010
A joint project of Ephemeral States and Helvetica Jones
Repurposes is an exhibition that seeks to present work representing themes of reexamining and reengaging convictions or finding new uses for what’s been produced for other prospects. Instead of crafting new doctrines for how we should regard our world and ourselves, we might first rehabilitate meanings that have been lost or disfigured. We must also face the overproduction of material culture and its implications for our self and the environment. How might we employ and transform the abundant objects and imagery that already exists? In a time of historic change and challenge—politically, economically, technologically—how do we remake ourselves?
Works may address the idea of Repurposes either in their concept or their material form. Submissions of existing 2D and interactive (short QuickTime movies, Flash animations) work are welcome in addition to proposals for installation work. Submissions should be either as high-quality JPEG images or PDFs.
Curated by Kenneth FitzGerald, Associate Professor of Art, Old Dominion University, and Garland Kirkpatrick, Associate Professor of Art, Loyola Marymount University.
Deadline for submissions: Friday, October 2, 2009
Selections announced: Monday, November 30, 2009
Deadline to receive work: Monday, February 15, 2010
Show opens: Saturday, March 20, 2010
Show closes: Sunday, April 18, 2010
Send submissions to:
Kenneth FitzGerald
Art Department
Old Dominion University
Hampton Boulevard
Norfolk VA 23529
757 683 5459
kfitzger@odu.edu
Please click on over to Design Observer and read my latest essay, the post “I Believe in Design,” which went on line March 22. For a gallery with more images of the van mentioned at the start and end of the piece, go here.
Projects like the visual/literary journal Four Minutes to Midnight (23:56 from now on) evoke Steve Baker’s “A Poetics of Graphic Design?” The 1994 article—which appeared in the Andrew Blauvelt-edited New Perspectives: Critical Histories of Graphic Design—is one of the most intriguing essays written about graphic design criticism. It proposed a unique method of representing design activity.
Baker drew upon the writings of French feminist writer Hélène Cixous to propose a “more imaginative form of critical writing.” It would “…take(s) its lead from Cixous’s demonstration that the visual and verbal need not always be kept strictly apart, but can escape to each other’s territories and beyond.” This “graphic design poetics” would be a critical method that (no surprise here) evaded the “’masculine’ linearity” prevalent in criticism and multiplied meaning. Before that, graphic design’s nature as a hybrid form of text and image interplay simply calls for a distinctive form to discuss it. Continue reading “The Chronographical Survey #3: Four Minutes to Midnight, Issue 10”